1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates in general to apparatuses and methods for image processing. In particular, the invention relates to a method and an apparatus for image processing in which contour points are determined from the image data and, on the basis of the contour points, a segmentation is carried out, during which associated contour points are combined to form objects for further processing.
2. Description of Related Art
Image processing systems are currently used for a wide variety of technical applications in order to effect automatic object identification. For example, industrial robots are frequently oriented on the basis of processed image data, which enable a robot to identify an object and its location and position. In order to ensure a reliable identification of objects, however, a large amount of “a priori” knowledge about the object to be identified has been required up to now. This also often entails the creation of specially tailor-made software solutions for the respective technical field of application. Obviously, such an approach is very elaborate and correspondingly expensive. Also, in this case, technical implementation often additionally entails tedious learning processes, by means of which the system is trained to identify selected objects.
A further drawback is that memory-intensive and complicated calculations are required for the image identification. Therefore, a real-time identification is can hardly be effected in this way.